Our country has awakened, recently, to the tensions between communities of color and the police who work in those same communities. Certainly many Americans, particularly Americans of color, have been aware of these tensions for some time. I remember hearing about Amadou Diallo getting shot 19 times in 1999 by four NYPD officers who fired a total of 41 bullets at the unarmed Black man. That’s as far back as my memory for this sort of thing stretches; I humbly acknowledge that for others, pigment and circumstance have necessitated a longer memory.

Diallo got some national attention, and even a Bruce Springsteen song about the killing, but in the end the officers were acquitted and we all went on with our lives. There have been other killings of unarmed minorities by police in the years since, some of which have garnered more attention than others. Oscar Grant was unarmed and lying on the ground when he was shot in the back and killed by a Bay Area Rapid Transit officer. Grant got a film; the officer got involuntary manslaughter.

Still, though, many of us hadn’t woken up. Trayvon Martin’s death was even more high profile, though if you’re paying close attention and disinclined to agree with the path I’m cutting, you’ll likely point out that he wasn’t killed by law enforcement. Fair enough. Even so, George Zimmerman was a neighborhood watch captain, and, it seems clear enough now, used his position of authority in order to wield power over the unarmed African-American teen.

If the details were different, the trend is the same, and reveals some troubling attitudes buried deep in the American consciousness about how we feel about young Black men.

Among those: Eric Garner and Mike Brown. The killings of these two unarmed Black men by police (and the non-indictment decisions that followed) woke us up as a country. There were protests, there were riots, athletes wearing shirts that said “I can’t breathe” (Garner’s last words while being choked to death by police), and social media campaings.

The most notable of these is #blacklivesmatter, a simple hashtag that captured the country’s attention.

Unfortunately, when the spotlight came on and woke us all up, many of us weren’t ready, and had a hard time seeing clearly.

Enter #alllivesmattter, a reactionary hashtag that seems to suggest that we live in a post-racial utopia with a Black president and everything, and so should get over the notion that any of us is different than the other. In some cases it seems to be an attempt to drown out voices crying out for racial justice, in other cases it seems perhaps a genuine belief that we’re all living the same reality. Some demonstrate a limited understanding of the law (and cast minorities as criminals).

Implicit in #alllivesmatter is the notion that anyone was saying that it’s not the case, or that #blacklivesmatter is actually suggesting somehow that #blacklivesmattermore. This is false.

What’s not false, and what is absolutely critical context for this whole discussion, is a ProPublica analysis of police killings from October, 2o14, which states the following:

Young black males in recent years were at a far greater risk of being shot dead by police than their white counterparts – 21 times greater i, according to a ProPublica analysis of federally collected data on fatal police shootings.

21 times greater. To say #alllivesmatter, then, is to attempt to erase the privilege that whites enjoy, one in which, by and large, we get to worry about being killed by the police 21 times less than African-Americans.

That’s completely staggering. We are not, then, all the same. Those who try to suggest that we are and that we are all living the same experiences are not, I’d venture to guess, familiar with very many Black people.

Since #blacklivesmatter and #alllivesmatter took hold in the collective consciousness, we experienced another tragedy. A mentally ill Ismaayil Brinsley shot and killed NYPD officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos. They were ambushed and murdered in their car, a brutal killing, like so many others, that should raise questions about our country’s attitudes towards guns and mental health.

Again, setting aside fringe elements like Brinsley, in the main, no one is suggesting that police lives don’t matter, least of all me. In fact, my brother-in-law credits a police officer with saving his life by busting him for dealing drugs, an event that directly led to his own sobriety and pursuing a career as a chemical dependency counselor. Police do heroic work and face great dangers. They are not infallible, as we’ve seen, but their lives do, in fact, matter.

Here’s the problem. Social media users, seeking to advocate for law enforcement, could have come up with any number of clever hashtags to do so. To advocate for police at this very moment, however, using the very language that, let’s be honest, communites that have been oppressed by police are using to advocate for themselves, is insulting. It is tantamount to the kind of cultural appropriation that minorities in this country have faced since its inception. It is, in fact, like saying #policelivesmattermore.

What’s more, they have obfuscated the issue. To ask police to stop killing unarmed Black men is not the same as being anti-cop. To say that #blacklivesmatter is not to say that white people don’t matter, or police, or anything else, but rather that we need to figure out a way to work together to create a society in which we do not have a racial predictability about which group is most likely to be killed by the police.

Those of us who, by virtue of our skin color, enjoy unearned privilege in this society need to put off guilt and shame and defensive posturing and instead examine and own our privilege, and in fact use it to create a more equitable world than the one we were handed.

I intentionally avoid using this blog for conventional blog posts. There’s enough of that on the internet, and my goal in maintaining a blog is to have something of a presence for my more real-deal literary pursuits. Even so, it seems some updating is in order.

In August I wrote an update indicating that I was residing not in my hometown of Minneapolis, but in my wife’s hometown of Santa Ana, California. I remember writing that post I tried to be careful not to tip my hand too far; rereading it now I see I didn’t do that great a job of hiding my unhappiness. Scrolling further, the poetry that came out of that time gave further hints (“Jilting” was me vowing to return a Minneapolis I left stranded at the altar — I’m that important, while “On the Realization of Dreams” was about just that — holding the reality of a life in California up to the dream of it, and also about how tragedy can feed a dream).

So we’re back in Minneapolis, and for a variety of reasons, none of which really make enough sense on their own, but which taken together were like a tractor beam from somewhere deep below Minnehaha Creek. It’s a period of adjustment, to say the least, both in terms of housing and employment, financials and long commutes and, frankly, the guilty feeling that comes from snatching a toddler out from under his extended family. We had that feeling in California, too, and it’s clearly a situation for which there are no easy answers. But this is home, and despite everything, it makes so much sense to be here.

I was going to say that it feels so wonderful to be here, but it isn’t, for the most part, elation, it’s more a constant comfort, or rather, the absence of longing. It’s knowing where the bathrooms are at First Avenue, or ordering a drink from someone at Muddy Waters I used to work the Monday afternoon shift with at Extreme Noise fifteen years prior. All sort of dumb stuff, but nice all the same. Turns out I was too old to start over, and I know it now.

In the meantime, though, the world is still a mess. I just watched a room full of students pledge allegiance to a country whose Central Intelligence Agency apparently thought rectal feeding was a thing that made sense/was humane/might produce some good intel. Further, it seems we are a country who thinks that white cops killing unarmed black men is completely inactionable. I believe in beauty and goodness and hope, but sometimes it’s difficult to imagine.

And I know, too, that it’s complicated. To quote the always brilliant Propagandhi:

“And yes, I recognize the irony. The system I oppose affords me the luxury of biting the hand that feeds. That’s exactly why privileged fucks like me Should feel obliged to whine and kick and scream. Yeah, until everyone has everything they need.”

So that’s the update on my whereabouts and general feelings about the state of things.

I also have some writing news, which is maybe why you tune in. I’m thrilled to announce that my essay “On Infertility” will be in the final issue of Rad Dad Magazine. Their online presence is a little tricky to negotiate, but I believe that the tenacious among you can order your copy here, though it may take some clicking.

I find it tough, for whatever reason, to commit to serious writing during the schoolyear (did you already know that I’m a teacher?), and so don’t produce a lot in the way of poetry or essays during these months, though I do have a lot of ideas ruminating in my head. I do, however, continue to write about music at my other web location, the Shuffler. I hope you’ll consider clicking on over there as well.

I’m cranking out the music posts with far more regularity than I am the more literary works that this blog was intended to showcase. That’s cool, that’s kind of how it works sometimes — the other stuff takes longer. But poems cohabitating with posts about Atmosphere or whatever seemed like kind of a strange set-up, and ultimately, this wasn’t meant to be a music blog.

So.

I’ve migrated the music posts to a new corner of the internet, http://thisistheshuffler.wordpress.com. There you’ll find all the old stuff, plus some new stuff, all with a snazzy new design that I think suits its purpose a bit better.

Shufflers 0001-0013 will continue to live here for a week or two, then this blog will turn back into the quiet library of poetry, essays, and short stories.

Archbishop Óscar Romero’s birthday was last week. My family marked the date with a trip to a pupusería for dinner, something I know some other friends were doing a couple time zones away. I know that the Catholic church is in the process of beatifying him, which I think is maybe how you become a saint. No longer a believer myself, I’m only glad that I was able to pray at Romero’s tomb while in El Salvador in 2002.

Americans would do well to understand that our current refugee crisis with unaccompanied Central American minors has everything to do with the atrocities against which Romero bravely preached and U.S. involvement in those atrocities.

Por un Futuro Mejor

When asked about the warMiguel lifts his shirt to showa tangle of scars froma homemade bomb.

Imagine Miguel in conflict outsideel Museo de la Revolución Salvadoreña,tracing the lines on his stomach,which is now so uneasy.

A neighborhood of sadness and struggle,como la linea.

La Linea where he makes his home,a sprawling slum from San Martínto Soyapango and beyond,a sea of shacks on a decommisioned rail line.

Miguel remembers it wasn’t always this way.He tells a story of a boy he grew up withwho lost his legs to a speeding train.

“The existence of poverty as a lackof what is necessaryis an indictment.”

Miguel never heard the Archbishop’s wordsbroadcast on rebel radiowhile fighting on the other side,but he can’t get them out of his head.

Imagine me in Morazánoutside that same museum.Me and Miguel and Monterrosa’s ghostand a myriad of unanswerable questionsabout life and death, wealth and withoutand history’s immutable thirst for blood.

What follows is an essay I wrote about two years ago. I’ve tried here and there to find a home for it since, but to no avail. It is extremely personal, and so it bothered me to not have it out in the world. I still hope that it can someday find a home beyond this blog, which I suppose is what I hope for all of my writing, but this one especially. In the meantime, here you go.

On Infertility

I’m in a busy diner during the lunch rush, waiting for a friend to finish paying. I’m struggling to manage the weight of my infant son’s car seat. He’s not terribly heavy, but the seat is tricky to maneuver in tight spaces. It’s pouring rain outside, and I’m trying to remember where we parked when the restaurant staff start doting over my son.

To be fair, he’s adorable. We share no biology, something I’ll expand upon in a moment, but suffice it to say that I can take no credit for his incredible cuteness. Let’s be honest, there are some funny looking babies out there – luckily, we were able to dodge that bullet.

For most of my marriage, I wasn’t sure I wanted kids. It wasn’t a tough decision to make as we were usually broke. If we were going to have kids, it would have to be when we were financially secure enough to swing it; if that never happened, we could take all of that extra money we didn’t have in the first place and do a bunch of traveling. Either way, it seemed we’d be able to find a happy outcome.

But then I got the bug. You hear about this happening to people, but it sounds so trite, like an eleven-year-old-girl back from her first baby-sitting gig. And even though I cried during The Notebook, I still somehow thought I wasn’t given to such emotional frivolity. If we were going to have kids, it wasn’t going to be because I was a total sap.

Turns out I was wrong. All it took was seeing dads and kids at Target and Home Depot, and I was gone. I’d see these tiny people, barely up to their dads’ knees, teetering along, slowly, deliberately. And they were holding hands with Daddy.

I was stricken.

Completely.

My wife and I soon began trying. This was a revelation for me: despite what you may think, trying-to-conceive-a-baby sex is some of the silliest sex there is. In place of passion, spontaneity, and romance, are pressure, obligation, and a foreboding sense of timing.

It becomes rote, and both of you are aware of how strange that is, and maybe feel guilty about it, but still, the show must go on. And then you try to change it up, and next thing you know, you’ve got blankets spread out on the bathroom floor (which really sounds so very disgusting in retrospect, but isn’t sex kind of gross to begin with?), but the sink is running because it’s cold outside and the pipes are frozen (!) and halfway through you’re both getting splashed in the face with sinkwater, and who can take any of that seriously at all? Not the guy who’s complaining about the cramp in his back, I can promise you that.

As it turned out, all of our trying was in vain, and so eventually I went in for a test. In an interesting twist of medical nomenclature, what could have been dressed up in jargon, couched in all kinds of Greek and Latin prefixes, is instead called by the somewhat undignified moniker of “semen analysis,” probably to avoid giving the mistaken impression that there would be any self-respect happening anywhere in the process.

The office was decorated in dark oak and oriental rugs, something like an alpine hunting lodge. This overt expression of masculinity struck me as incredibly transparent, rooted in the idea that men in my position might need some sort of testosterone-based reinforcement. But just because I could see through their design choices didn’t mean that I was immune to the inherent discomfort of my situation. I’m a teacher, and I had a colleague covering my classes for me (“I have a doctor’s appointment…”); could I face a room full of high schoolers when this was all over?

A nurse led me back to a small room. She was older, maternal, in the gruff, all-business way of so many older, maternal women. The room’s main feature was a reclining lounge chair covered in coarse medical paper, but she also made sure to let me know about the fertility-friendly lubricant that wouldn’t mess with my count, the dimmer switch “for mood lighting”, the pornography in the cupboard, and where to put my sample when I was done.

I would have given anything to be trying instead.

A few days later I got a call from another nurse. She said that volume of the sample I produced looked good, the motility (movement of the sperm within the sample) was also good, but there was a problem.

There was a problem, yet her voice was so detached from the gravity of this news and the effect it was having upon me. She would, I supposed, have more of these calls to make that afternoon, piled up in the days to come for as long as she cared to imagine.

But there was a problem.

Conservatively speaking, she explained, there are usually at least fifteen million sperm swimming around in one millileter of ejaculate – occasionally even ten times that number. Mine had sixteen.

“As in, six more than ten?”

It turns out that’s what sixteen means.

People will tell you that “it only takes one,” and, you know, I saw Look Who’s Talking, I know how it works, but on a line graph with 150 million on the top and zero on the bottom, sixteen is effectively zero. All those “it only takes one” optimists might as well buy me a Powerball ticket while they’re at it – I’d spend my winnings on reproductive surgery.

I hadn’t expected this news. I was devastated. I walked the dog, shuffling through a gray day in my neighborhood, trying to get my head together. I passed by the gas station, busy with customers, and was aware of how disconnected we all are from the problems of others.

I think I knew that there were options available to me, I just hadn’t expected to need them, and wasn’t sure yet how I felt about them. More troubling than anything was the overwhelming knowledge that I had no idea what I was going to do.

The next day I was in a meeting at work and counted seventeen people in the room. One more than sixteen. My stomach was in my throat. Of course, it was a strange analogy to make, English department to sperm count, but that’s where my head was. At least there weren’t fifteen million, I guess.

The doctors encouraged me to go see a specialist. This proved to be problematic; my wife and I had been operating on a somewhat specific timeline, one that was predicated upon academic and professional responsibilities. We now found ourselves working within a rapidly closing window of time, and the specialist scheduled appointments two months out. After months of charting temperatures and mucus quality, and all that overwrought sex, this was a new level of anxiety I hadn’t anticipated.

And don’t think I can’t hear you, clucking away about the folly of trying to plan something like this down to the letter, how no one can control these sorts of things. I get it, I do, but the way our professional and academic lives were structured, it was going to be really awesome to have a baby during months A, B, and C, and infinitely more difficult to do so during months X, Y, and Z.

I realized that I had even fewer options than before, compounding my disappointment. I felt lost. Any move I made seemed to negate other, plausible-seeming moves. Seeing the specialist meant waiting an indeterminate amount of time for a baby. Not seeing a specialist meant not knowing what the problem was, effectively shutting down the family line. These facts, all of them new and unforeseen, required resolute action, a deliberate strength of purpose that I was decidedly lacking.

My wife, an excellent internet researcher, hit the trying-to-conceive message boards and pregnancy blogs, and the occasional real-deal medical website. We read about a couple who had struggled with infertility, ultimately settling on the mantra “baby in the house.” We took it to mean baby in the house by any means necessary, and hadn’t this been my goal from the beginning? This mantra was so simple, so obvious, we adopted it as our own. I felt very near to having the clarity I’d need to make a decision.

At this point, we also stumbled upon a probable cause for my near-sterility. When I was an infant, I had a hernia. I grew up hearing the story about how I was blue from the legs down, like a Smurf in reverse. Our working theory, although never confirmed, is that when the doctors went in to fix me up, they may have accidentally snipped this, knotted that, and given me the inspiration for my upcoming children’s book, Daddy’s Tangled Apparatus. I was relieved to have something resembling an explanation, especially one that made so much sense.

Working on this assumption, we decided to pursue a sperm donor. More on this in a moment, but first I’d like to acknowledge that we were, in fact, working on an assumption, a theory, which was, in fact, never confirmed.

I think many people find this to be a reckless decision, like I gave up and quit on myself. Who knows, right? Maybe I could have been untangled, reattached, or otherwise had my fecundity restored. And I don’t want to be cavalier about this at all – it was an incredibly difficult decision to be sure. There was a lot of insecurity and second-guessing.

But my goal was to have a baby in the house, not to cultivate a biological legacy. Allowing that goal to really take primacy over everything else was very liberating, once I got there. Given the choice, I would have preferred not to have any infertility issues, but that preference didn’t seem worth putting my goal on hold indefinitely.

Not only that, but we have a lot of gay friends who are starting families. Same-sex parents have no choice but to begin with a donor of some sort, and I’m not sure how productive it is for the non-biological parent to lament the lack of shared DNA once the baby arrives. Any self-pity others would foist upon me seemed strictly a function of straight privilege.

We began to research donor agencies so that we could begin to research donors. I was, of course, grateful for the chance to become a father at all, but less so when presented with the opportunity to pay thirty-five dollars for a silhouette of a potential donor’s face in profile.

Even so, there were some humorous moments in the selection process. Despite being a run-of-the-mill white guy, I have been told my entire life that I look Asian. The agency’s computers agreed – we submitted pictures of me in order to produce a list of potential donors whose offspring might resemble something I could create. The first guy on the list was 100% Chinese, the second 100% Vietnamese. Of course.

In the end we picked one whose heritage a little more closely aligned with our own, and after lugging liquid nitrogen tanks around from the garage to the trunk of the car to the doctor’s office, success! When my wife walked into the bedroom with a positive pregnancy test in her hand, it was the happiest moment in my life up to that point, and one I’ll never forget.

During the pregnancy we talked some about how I might react when the baby finally came. His in utero name was New Guy, and I was pretty sure I wouldn’t feel any less connected to him than if he were the fruit of my own loins. Still, we both knew that this was one of those big life things for which you just can’t predict a reaction. Not until you’ve lived it.

I’m happy to report that after a long and difficult labor, my son finally arrived, and when he did, I cried tears of joy like never before. He’s seven weeks old now, and while there are difficult times, reflux-induced sleepless nights, diaper blowouts and moments of self-doubt and insecurity, I have no misgivings whatsoever about my decision. Quite the contrary, the levies of my heart are struggling against levels of love and joy I could never have imagined. He is altogether mine, and I am his daddy, and like parents everywhere, biological or otherwise, the task now falls to me to be the best parent that I can possibly be.

When we were selecting a donor, my plan was to use a donor for the first child so that we could get our family started, and then later on get checked out and possibly repaired. Since my son has arrived, however, I am dead set against that course of action, and hope to use the same donor a next time. Part of this is because this baby is exactly one hundred times cuter than anything I might have produced, but also because I can’t bear to think of him wondering someday if I love him less than his sibling because of biology. What’s more, as much as I hate to think about it, I have to acknowledge the possibility that there could be a stronger connection to a child who shared my biology, and that’s not something I’m willing to risk. I love my son too much.

It’s a taboo topic, to be sure, tied up as it is in notions of masculinity, virility, and manhood, and this upsets me. I have never thought for a second that my low sperm count made me less of a man. I don’t bring it up during casual conversation at cocktail parties (“well, you know we had to use a donor because I can barely make sperm”), mostly because I imagine it would make other people uncomfortable, but a little bit I wish I could. I love my son, and I wouldn’t know him otherwise, and that’s why I’m proud that we chose to use a donor. I look forward to having lots of conversations with him about all the different kinds of families in the world.

But maybe the rest of the world isn’t ready. In the meantime, back at the diner, a member of the staff says “Oh, you’re just so handsome like your daddy.” And of course I know it’s me, but I still can’t help myself. I pick up the car seat, smile wryly, and whisper, “Who is your daddy, anyway?”

I’m not exactly sure what size or sort of audience these words will find once they’re out in the world, but I haven’t updated this blog in about a year, which is roughly 25% of its short life, so an update seems appropriate.

At the end of June my family said a tearful goodbye to the Twin Cities and headed west to Santa Ana, California. I’ve moved away from Minneapolis once before, in 2002, to Chicago, where I got married, and it was at a time when I was fairly rootless and, as such, portable. This time, though, we’d been living in Minneapolis for a decade, and saying goodbye to family, friends, and even our house was difficult.

I’m currently staying home with our young son and looking for work teaching high school English, a task I’ve made more difficult for myself via my stubborn insistence on teaching in a public school district (i.e., not private, not charter). That’s a topic for another conversation, one in which I’d happily indulge for anyone who is interested, but for now, suffice it to say, it’s tricky to feel too connected to a place in which my life hasn’t yet really gotten going.

Meanwhile, the world is in chaos. Gaza. Iraq. Unaccompanied minors. Eric Garner. Robin Williams. Michael Brown. Probably a host of other terrible things I’m missing. It can be a dark place, this world, and a casual observer of this blog may wonder if I’m trying to make a cottage industry of poems about murdered teens.

But the world can be beautiful, too. It smells good here, nearly all the time. That’s something. Really. There are a million plants that I’ve never seen before, and some (like jade) that I do recognize as houseplants are growing free and wild and giant here. That’s something else. Standing in the ocean is a beautiful thing, and so is seeing dolphins or sea lions.

I should write some poems about those things.

We should all, each of us, spend time focusing on some of those beautiful things in our own lives, in our own locales. It’s therapeutic, and, lately, necessary.

But as we do, I think it’s important not to take our eyes off of the ugliness, the injustices in the world. I think we have to hold those things in balance so that we can work to make the world more beautiful, to set things right.

It’s maybe naive to think that an ad hoc manifesto on a wordpress poetry blog might have something to do with that, but I’m okay with that. I’m pretty good at balancing my naivete with a heavy helping of cynicism.

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BIO

Daniel Muro LaMere is a teacher and writer from Minneapolis, Minnesota. He writes about music at thisistheshuffler.wordpress.com.

ABOUT

Most of what appears here is poetry, with some essays and other writings. All work should be considered the intellectual property of Daniel Muro LaMere and copyrighted as such. The author knows zero about intellectual property law, but is married to an attorney, so watch it.